Plans always were to have both FP and FP+ available for an extended overlapping period. It will take time to convert all tickets and get the biggest bugs solved. It's unclear exactly when all the APs are being converted. Disney already has a ton of "old" tickets sold. It's going to take time.
As I recall, the first deployment of MagicBands at BWI has been pushed back about a month. This is some indication of the problems they are running into.
Regardless of anyone’s opinion on the subject, just consider what Disney is trying to do. Each FP+ selection can be thought of as a reservation. People will have (at last report) 3 FP+ selections per day. Disney has 30 million visitors annually. Disney wants to integrate all transactions into a single system. It's an enormous project. It's going to have problems. Things are not going to work the way they wanted and they are going to have to come up with alternate plans.
Just because some senior executive puts together a Microsoft Project or Power Point presentation with a schedule doesn't mean that schedule has any basis in reality. Sadly, executives often are way over their heads when it comes to putting together "real" R&D schedules. Something of this magnitude is simply frightening. It's the old "if every task has a 95% chance of being completed on time, then we're only going to be about a year late." Executives almost always put together schedules based on what they want, not based on any sort of reality of what it's actually going to take. I can imagine all these senior Disney execs in a huff over what's happening while there are a bunch of engineers saying "We told you this was going to happen but you didn't listen. You never do."
Given the scope of what they are trying to accomplish, it will be a minor miracle if NextGen is only a few months behind schedule. If NextGen ends up only being six months behind, IMHO they would have done a pretty good R&D job.
